


Diamond Fall

by Monochromely



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-12
Updated: 2019-01-12
Packaged: 2019-10-08 23:44:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17395982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Monochromely/pseuds/Monochromely
Summary: In the battle against White Diamond, Yellow is possessed.





	Diamond Fall

_**i.** _

They are monsters—oh, it’s true— _but not like this._

Pink Diamond is splayed beneath them, still and pale in his Pearl’s arms. She pulls her long fingers over his cheeks, his curly hair, his _gem,_ but he doesn’t so much as stir. A faint red line drips down his right eye.

The fusion yells at them.

They deserve it.

They’re monsters.

Dictators.

Rulers.

Tyrants.

Villains.

They are, they are, they are—the war machine tells them as much in so many words— _but not like this_ , she wants to say, wants to scream, wants to cry.

Not for Pink.

Blue Diamond tilts her head slowly to the left, cerulean eyes clashing against gold, and Yellow’s sharp chin descends into a brutal nod—militaristic and ready.

“Lecture us later,” she tells the Garnet, nose upturned in both apparent _and_ felt haughtiness (if haughtiness is a clever disguise for shame).

“Or don’t,” Yellow adds gruffly.

“It’ll take White a few moments longer to disconnect completely from Homeworld’s mainframe, so until then—”

“Run, hide, take shelter—get Pink off this damn planet.”

The other Diamond’s gloved hand is clenched into a fist only inches away from her own. Blue desperately wants to breach the space between them. Wants to temple their fingers and whisper final secrets into her willing ear. _I’ve adored you. I’ve needed you. I’ve loved you_. Wants to walk Homeworld’s long hallways with her as their tall shadows lengthen in the dusk. Wants another moment, another second of this eternity they’ve stolen together by believing in their own invincibility.

But that was just another lie, and this is the truth.

There is no more time.

There is only facing White and losing.

Blue Diamond’s hand remains by her side.

“We won’t be able to hold her for long,” she admits, “so make the most of what we can give you.”

Her gaze is on the boy, the gem, the Diamond, extinguished in the Pearl’s arms.

Beyond his eye, the star on his shirt has been torn through, too.

And so here are some _more_ wants, clawing up inside her like a storm: she desperately wants to kiss Pink’s forehead one last time, wants to tell him so many things, while wishing he would forget others—wants to say _sorry_ most of all—but at the slightest shift of her heavy robes, the little band of Crystal Gems stiffen into defensive positions. The Pearl’s defiant chin flick is her weapon in place of a spear.

“How do we know this isn’t a trick?” The Amethyst demands, her dark eyes narrowed into slits.

“Yeah, clods!” That _truly_ mouthy Peridot chimes in. “Prove that you’re not gonna, like, like, backstab us while we’re trying to make a run for it!”

“Insolent—“ Yellow starts, but Blue raises a firm hand, silencing the deluge before it can even begin.

“Believe us, don’t believe us—on your gems be it,” she says coldly, “but know this, Crystal Gems. We _love_ Pink more than we fear White.”

A beat.

A pulse.

Pink continues _not_ to be awake.

“Then prove it,” the fusion snarls.

And so they do.

_**ii.** _

They prove it by hurtling electricity and energy and everything else in their arsenal at this bastardization of the Diamond they once loved. White Diamond used to stretch out in the pools with them, her long neck craned backwards in a high, lilting laugh. She played Pink’s games, and she called Blue _Moonlight_ without sneering it. She looked over Yellow’s reports on mining efficiencies, and they would strategize new methods of production _together_. She told them they were special.

She meant it back then.

And she didn’t—she absolutely _did not_ —sacrifice her sanity to a dying Homeworld.

She was White Diamond, and she _led_ it.

“Aren’t you two a little old for these foolish games?” The Diamond laughs as their attacks glance off of her as harmlessly as pebbles. She saunters forward on her impeccable heels in the very way a predator might play with its meal, one foot over the other, her translucent cape swaying behind her like an eager tail. Behind the pitiful wall Blue and Yellow form together with their bodies, stand White and Pink’s ships, gleaming in the reddish light of Homeworld. “Stand aside now, and perhaps I’ll be _lenient_ with you later.”

The word lenient rolls across her elegant tongue before landing with the hard _t_.

Blue flinches, and Yellow growls, “Like you even know what that word means anymore! Look at you, White! You’re, you’re—”

White Diamond swoops down upon the half-sentence like a vulture, her teeth razor sharp. “I’m what now, _Sunlight_?”

 _Sunlight_ rolls and lands, too.

Venomously.

It is both a threat and a promise.

It is a taste of what’s yet to come for the disobedient Diamonds.

Yellow Diamond, for once in her eternal life, does not say a word.

“That’s what I thought,” White hums, a sickly smile spreading across her black lips like a scourge. Close enough now, she extends a clawed hand—slowly, as though she has all the time in the world—and places it under Yellow’s imperiously lifted chin. “Oh, you know, you’ve always been my favorite, _Sunlight_. So utilitarian and obedient. I draw the lines in our black sands, and you toe them oh-so-carefully like a good little general.” She throws an amused glance Blue’s way. “Moonlight, I adore you, too, of course… but you’ve been, _ah_ , rather useless for the last six thousand years. And Starlight—dear me, Starlight…”

She drags her coal black eyes into the very direction that Blue and Yellow had deposited Pink and the Crystal Gems.

Of course she knows.

_Of course._

The goddess shakes her magnificent head.

“I’m going to ensure that Starlight doesn’t see the sun for another six-thousand years more.”

Blue Diamond screams, and Yellow Diamond lunges—a great golden mass of brutality and anger and fear and bravery. Her eyes are electric with rage; lightning crackles across the sharp planes of her face. 

(They are monsters—yes, Garnet, it’s true—but not like _this_. _Not for Pink_.)

She reaches for her creator’s gem.

She’s almost there...

... _yes!_

Fingers outstretched and closing upon the shining facets of White Diamond.

But in an instant faster than seems possible, White’s arm shoots upwards, and in another incomprehensible second more, she has apprehended her Sunlight, has her dangling in her claws.

She grabs Yellow’s long neck with one hand—eliciting an awful choking sound—and curls her fingers around the Diamond’s temples with the other. White energy begins to flood all the way down from her head to the train of her gown.

“Oh, Sunlight,” she says sadly, “I wish you wouldn’t have done that.”

_**iii.** _

“I didn’t want a puppet,” White Diamond murmurs so softly that it almost sounds like a dream, “but, dear me, Moonlight, I couldn’t have her charging at me like that, could I?”

Yellow Diamond screams as White pours herself into her, but Blue cannot hear a sound, because there is white light spewing from her mouth where noise should be, and her beautiful golden irises been erased, have been replaced with white, too. White, white, white—that’s all there is—and Blue is on her knees, scrabbling as close as she can to Yellow without looking at her face directly.

She grabs her hand, like she should have done before— _before_ , when it was not too late, _before_ , when the world around them wasn’t crumbling to dust.

But Yellow does not squeeze back.

Her fingers are in tangles of agony.

She screams and screams and screams some more; Blue is almost relieved that she can’t hear.

“Cease this madness, White!” She gasps. It’s all she can do. “ _Please._ Go back to your altar! Release Yellow! It’s pointless to do this to her! Pink’s already gone!”

White’s own irises are eradicated, too, but she sneers at Blue anyway, her black lips parting to reveal threateningly perfect teeth.

“Go back?!” she laughs. “Go back! Are you a broken record, dear? Is that all you want to these days—to  _go back_? I mean, it’s a commendable goal, but, Moonlight, there is no unpressing the button now! There’s no unringing the bell! Starlight left us, and now she has returned, and you have attacked me, and now I’m about to direct Sunlight to attack you! _Oh, the circle of life_! Isn’t it lovely?”

Grasping for coherent words feels like gasping for air.

She comes up with nothing.

She’s suffocating.

Yellow Diamond wrenches her fist away from Blue’s hand violently, clenching it closer to her side.

“We’re your Diamonds, White!”

“ _You disobeyed me_ ,” she snarls immediately, her facade breaking and then reforming just as quickly as it had shattered. The ugly lines in her face rearrange themselves back into that even uglier smile. “And so I will not forgive you.”

The light in White Diamond’s eyes suddenly fades, leaving nothing behind but blackness.

She plucks her fingers from Yellow’s temples, one by one by one, and smiles some more.

“Sunlight, do be a dear and make sure Blue Diamond is distracted for me.”

Yellow’s sharp chin tilts downwards to where Blue is still on the ground, her lank hair falling in curtains around her face.

Once upon a time, she would have helped her up.

Would have sang to her.

Would have gotten a Pearl to sing to them both.

Once upon a time, cerulean eyes would have met gold, and all of the hard feelings between them would have melted like rivers.

Yellow Diamond’s eyes are white and glowing.

A snarl cuts through her face, transforming all of the harsh lines in them into open wounds.

“ _Yellow…_ ”

But the Diamond is unseeing and unhearing.

A bastardization like the bastardization who made her.

A toy.

A killing machine.

White Diamond snakes between them, her long cape brushing Blue Diamond’s cheek like a kiss.

Or a sting.

Or a knife.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go capture a star.”

**iv.**

“When we were younger Diamonds, we used to fight over who would get to colonize a planet first,” Blue Diamond whispers, slowly moving backwards, her bare feet brushing against rubble and debris, metal and dust. “You used to call me a clod for getting to White before you did, and I’d tell you that your language was uncouth enough to belong to a mere Quartz.”

Yellow Diamond advances as Blue retreats, boot over heavy boot, sure and steady, a miraculous combination of shiny limbs and angular lines to behold.

But her eyes are not golden.

Stars, they’re not even close.

“And when we turned three-thousand, you took me to Andromeda, where we watched a star explode some millions of lightyears away. That was the first time you took my hand, Yellow.” She slipped her glove off, and she gently captured Blue’s hand, and in that moment, that carved out fraction of eternity, they discovered that their hands were precisely the same size. They built a temple between their fingers as the supernova bruised the sunset blue; they laid their palms upon the gently swaying grass and thought they would never die. “You said it was entirely possible that we were built for each other—that we were equals, partners, goddesses, and queens.”

Blue’s foot clips a jagged piece of exploded floor, and she collapses backwards onto the landing platform before she can find purchase. Shards and fragments knife into her skin, her spine, her elbows, her hair.

Yellow Diamond stops in front of her, her boots scuffing hard against the stone.

Her face is disinterested.

The _real_ Yellow could never be so detached.

Her plump lips are set into a cold, hard line.

“And then Pink came to us! _Pink_!” Blue exclaims, hysteria climbing up the rungs of her throat as the Diamond slowly bends down, her fingers twisting tightly into the heavy fabric covering Blue’s chest. “She used to perch on your shoulder like a little bird and hum songs into your ear, and because of this, you were always the best at guessing the hymns she sang underwater. How you laughed. How she did!”

Blue feels herself slowly being excavated from the ground, drawn up into the air with an iron fist.

“You prefer sunny planets to rainy ones because the light reflects handsomely on your armor.”

Shards fall like rain from Blue Diamond’s ascending body, and Yellow's pupiless gaze smolders like the sun.

“Every time I called for you, and even the times I didn’t—which was _more_ often because I’m quite stubborn— _you were there for me anyway_. You found me at altars, at the zoo, on Earth, and in her chambers. You tried so hard to be cruel, but your tiny kindnesses leaked out anyway.”

They’re at eye level again; Blue’s feet find tentative purchase against the platform, her toes dancing against rubble, but Yellow, possessed _and_ self-possessed, doesn’t let go of her robes, her white stare boring into her emptily.

Every harsh line in her face says nothing of the memories that bequeathed them to her.

“I hated you for trying so hard to save me.”

Her free hand begins to glow with electricity, lightning sparking off her fingertips.

“I loathed that you believed I was worth saving.”

And that electric hand curls into a fist, and that same fist rears back at a deadly angle.

The trajectory is Blue Diamond’s chest, is the diamond pulsating at her very center.

If it the blow lands, Blue will become nothing, a stone clattering to the dusty ground.

“But stars, you loved me,” she murmurs, reaching out and touching Yellow’s cold cheek. The Diamond flinches—Blue's not sure if it's against _her_ will or White's. She doesn't move her hand. Her thumb brushes against the single tear dripping from a glowing eye. It spills over her cerulean skin and down the slender lines of her wrist. It snakes around her arm like a bracelet. “You kept trying anyway.”

“ _Do it, Sunlight._ ” White Diamond’s command issues from behind Yellow’s teeth.

It’s blasphemy.

“I love you, Yellow.”

It's the truth.

 As Yellow Diamond’s hand hurtles through the air, Blue pools energy into her palm, the tips of her fingers glowing hot.

The world explodes around them in a burst of white light.

**v.**

They are binary stars falling—orbiting one another and crashing all at the same time.

The drop from the platform to the abyss below is approximately 300 feet, and the landing in store from them is full of jagged rocks and broken injectors, shards and debris.

But they’re Diamonds.

Invincible.

Immortal.

They won’t _shatter_ …

… but they won’t _survive_ either.

Not that the difference matters to Blue Diamond in the brief eternity between the flight and the fall.

Death is just a word, but Yellow Diamond, suspended above her, is so achingly _real_ that it hurts to even look at her. There are scratches on her impeccable armor and wind fingers in her hair, dividing every perfectly stiff strand of her pointy coiffure. _And her eyes_ —her eyes are golden again, widened in fear and anger and shock and grief. They search wildly for understanding, something to cling to, something solid to rationalize, and eventually, as they always do, land on:

“Blue!”

“Yellow!” She laughs hysterically as the wind whips her hair all around her. She is a maelstrom of emotion. Silver strands fly into her mouth.

“What the hell are _you_ laughing about?” The other Diamond shouts, extending her arms outwards. Her hands find Blue’s waist, and with panicked deftness, draws them together.

They fit like puzzle pieces.

Even their diamonds are touching, binary stars defying gravity to collide.

“Nothing,” she laughs again, the sound long and feral. Yellow stares at her incredulously as the light of Homeworld’s stars falls further and further away. “Or, I suppose, _everything_. Those two items tend to be one in the same.”

“We’re going to die," she says, so matter-of-factly, all disbelief in the face of Blue’s absurd amusement. Her hands have found the small of her back, and they’re solid there, foundations to lean upon.

Blue's laughter dies away, suddenly snatched up by the wind. 

They're falling fast.

It feels like they've been falling all of their lives.

“But we’ll come back,” she murmurs, gently pressing her chin into the crook between Yellow’s neck and shoulder, “and then we’ll save Pink, and then…”

“And then?”

Yellow Diamond’s armor stiffens on top of her.

The ground must be close.

Death is just a word, but Blue closes her hooded eyes against it anyway.

“And then… we wait and see.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is messy as all get out, but honestly, I just wanted to write some angst before "BOHAM" came out, lolol.
> 
> Hope you enjoy!


End file.
